Iron Man 3

1) I went to see Iron Man 3 today and enjoyed it enough, was very glad that Iron Man didn't urinate in his suit but felt that the film pissed all over the public who were keen to the super villain Mandarin that they might have come to know through the comic books and cartoons. However I wasn't too bothered about the latter problem.

2) I thought that the way the Iron Legion at the end all exploded like fireworks was more or less just a repetition of the time the robot army from Iron Man 2 all exploded like fireworks. The villains in this movie was a man who had his DNA altered, although he had become super fit because it, it did have a problem causing extreme over heating leading to the possibility of the person exploding like an bomb giving thousands of degrees of heat vaporising others around leaving shadows against the wall as if they were caught in a nuclear explosion. At times the people who had their DNA altered like this resulting in their eyes and other parts of their bodies starting to glow as if they were one of the scanners from the film scanners in the final fight sequence. 

3) I found it to be a very fun movie and then days later it seemed to be less interesting and almost forgettable. The substance just wasn't enough. The pointlessness of the Mandarin villain after having seen the cartoons was just too much.

Trance

a) I went to see the movie Trance today. It seemed to be quite a complicated matter going to see this movie, firstly I doesn't think much of Danny Boyle as a director, I usually found everything that he makes as a film boring and derivative whether it is or not. However the subject matter of the movie seemed interesting and the cast of the movie seemed good as well. 

b) To some degree I liked this movie, but the loud thumping soundtrack made me wonder if I was stuck in some building society advert that was trying to be modern, the music took away the feeling of any sort of mystery that the film might present as it went into hypnosis dream worlds and then it appeared to present dream worlds within dreamworlds making no clear destinction about what was supposed to be the real world. 

c) Often this can be an interesting thing such as in films like Brazil, Inception, Last Year at Marienbad, etcetera, but I got lost towards the end and I really wasn't that interested in trying to figure things out, it could be anything and I wasn't really that certain the movie was really worth spending time figuring out afterwards. Some people make movies that are supposed to be confusing and ought to inspire people to have conversations about it to figure it out but sometimes it might be better to steer oneself out of playing along with their games. 

d) The previous movie by Danny Boyle that I saw was the scifi movie Sunshine that was a fair effort but I suddenly realised that it was a reworking of the 1960s movie The Day The Earth Caught Fire and really wasn't impressed by the way that none of the people involved in the movie didn't mention a thing about the film trying to make out that Sunshine was a new movie. However the further into the past Sunshine goes, the better a movie it seems to be. 

e) However if Trance is another reworked ripoff of something, I don't know what it is but it might seem like a better film to remember in five or six years time but in the present time it seems rather annoying. But I definitely had to go and see it.

f) I never saw Trainspotting because I read an article about the hallucination sequences showing how they payed homage to certain movies and I became overcome with the idea of disinterest. Beyond that, the idea of the movie didn't really interest me. I haven't been drawn to the Trainspotting author's work either. The only thing that I have seen and like that came out of someone's interest in Irvine Welsh's work is the Scottish pixie from Chris Cunningham's Playstation advert years ago. Perhaps if I could empathise with Danny Boyle as a person a little more, I might have a different point of view about his movies but I don't and that seems to be that. I think another thing about the movie when it came out, I didn't like the idea of watching a movie full of people with thick Scottish accents.

g) Someone suggested that the reason why they had to show Rosario Dawson's vagina up close on the film screen was to make sure that no one could get to think she was some sort of character like the one played by Jay Davidson in The Crying Game. Well I admit that this isn't a Neil Jordan movie but I really have no idea what goes on in Boyle's movies, I hardly ever watch them and there's Cillian Murphy who was in Sunshine by Danny Boyle who went off to play a transgendered person in Neil Jordan's movie Breakfast on Pluto so you can never tell what's going on in the background of the world of these films. One might wonder at what the point of such exposure was and whether it would be blurred over or trimmed out in the DVD and Blu-Ray

h) Days later the story fades away and strange random blurred images remain in the mind which is actually a good feeling

A Place Beyond The Pines

1) I managed to get to see a movie, it may have been called A Place Beyond The Pines, a long grim trawl through three seemingly desperate scenarios that connect with each other, Ryan Gosling once again plays a man who's good at making a fast getaway and is dangerous with his bare fists (see Drive), while Bradley Cooper again plays a role where he seems to be too intelligent for his own good (see Limitless and A-Team) and in the last act of the last segment, and as the main character of the last segment slowly comes to understand the scenario that has built up along with set of other realisations that unfold, the feelings of grimness become expertly unpinned and they begin to dissipate.  

I am happy that I saw the movie , it felt like quite an experience and maybe I do not need to see it again, but on the other hand I will look out for the director's next movie, although I still haven't seen his previous on.

2) Chris Pines had no role in this movie whatsoever.

3) (24th April 2013) I continue to think about the infernal world of the "The Place Beyond the Pines" movie and how the light broke through towards the end. I saw the movie last Thursday and although quite a trawl, it remained interesting and the materlal handled almost masterly. It was not a world in which I cared to hang around in or think too much about but it remained with me. Most of the characters were not to my liking. That might even have been one of the good things about it.

Oblivion

1) I recollect that I went to see the movie Oblivion today. It was actuallly a visually very lovely film with the post apocalyptic destroyed Earth landscapes but I thought it was a but strange to think that the sky scrapers that formed the sides of the canyons amidst deep layers of earth or silt that buried the cities seemed a bit abstract, surely those exposed buildings would have collapsed under the weight a long time ago but their presence at least seemed poetic, quite wonderful visions.

The story line appeared to have a plot twist in common with the movie Moon, so it was somewhat a Philip K Dickian storyline. The flying machines had a wonderful sense of design to them. Maybe the truth about what the true villains seem to be looked as if they were running out of budget or ideas but was at least displayed on a grand scale. 

In one way the movie was utterly ridiculous and pointless and a complete load of cobblers but on another level it was quite a piece of wonder and seeing on the big screen certainly extended that abstract sense of wonder and perplexity that one might experience, and the almost abstract revelations in the plot that maybe if one has seen a good number of scifi movies it all might make sense where the ideas are coming from. 

Maybe if one admired such Tom Cruise films as Vanilla Sky one might enjoy this movie very much and those who remember the scene at the end of the original Planet of the Apes film where the Statue of Liberty is found almost completely buried might marvel at this film. Recognisable second hand ideas served up with 21st century vigour that those who are happy with Tom Crusie movies might indeed admire. I could very watch this again soon at the cinema and will get the blu-ray disc for sure.

2) Weeks later I am still overwhelmed by the feelings of this movie, the wonders of the post apocalyptic landscape and the puzzling half understood revelation about how real as humans Tom Cruise and his red headed partner were. Perhaps the details about the back story given by Morgan Freeman's character Beech about the truth of Jack didn't need to be completely understood by the likes of myself, I allowed half of it to remain as half misunderstood and misheard fragments because ultimately the truth can be only boring. 

The strange space craft with the many thousands of Toms being grown inside didn't really interest me that much, I had seen better visions at the end of Star Trek: The Motion Picture when the Enterprise entered V'ger and when Neo entered the Machine City at the end of The Matrix. With the likes of Cloud Atlas suddenly which brought the watcher to assemble fragments of stories from over many aeons, this film Oblivion almost invited the watcher to do the same with the fragments of the lives of Jack, Julia and Vika.

I thought that the red head woman who played Vika was an interesting choice in the movie and quite a curious face, I really hadn't heard of her before let alone thought that I'd seen her in anything. She certainly looked nicer in this movie than she did in Never Let Me Go. Someone informed me that she looks a bit like a young Bette Davis and yes I see what that's about